Tea and cake

Today we were invited to a friends house for tea, and I mean proper tea, with teapots and cake. My idea of food heaven. I met Anne and her husband Kevin at the bus stop the first day I managed to see Alice get on to the school bus, they have a 5th grader who takes the same bus. I have chatted to Anne several times since and we get on well, so was pleased to be invited over, they live just down our street. We had a lovely afternoon, which turned into an evening, and although they have three girls the kids all got on great and played well together.

Kevin spent a couple of years living in London and they love things British, so a Victoria sponge cake was in order. Anyone who knows me, knows I love baking, so I decided to give the big American oven a go and it performed great. However, my old trusted UK hand mixer was really slow on the 110V power supply so this was it's swansong, well, until we get back on to UK soil. I'm not normally sentimental about objects, but my hand mixer was a engagement present, not to me but my Mum, making it nearly 45 years old! It's seen some action, a lifetime of baking, cakes for the fun of it and cakes marking special occasions and milestones. Mum gave it to me 20 years ago when she got a replacement, which has subsequently broken. My new American one is good, but I doubt it will last as long as the trusty Philips, they don't make things like they used to.

Victoria sponge with strawberries and fresh cream, yum!

My trusty 45 year old Philips hand mixer, now retired.

Southlake Carroll Homecoming

The Southlake bumper sticker. Go Dragons!

'Homecoming' is an American tradition where school alumni and ex-residents are welcomed back and celebrated with parades and football matches. The City of Southlake's school district is called Carroll ISD (Independent School District), they have a dragon as a mascot and their colours are green, black and white. Everyone wears the shirts and the colours, and I mean everyone. The kids and teachers wear their shirts to school on game days, and you see people in Southlake walking around in their 'spirit wear'. The football players make an appearance at the elementary schools, helping the kids out of their cars at drop off and reading stories in the classroom, and are treated like celebrities. 'Keep the tradition' is emblazoned on everything, and they surely do. Coming from a place with a strong identity, and a dragon as a national icon, I like it.

Evan shoots some hoops

Homecoming kicked off with the Carroll Dragon Homecoming Carnival, Parade and Pep Rally on Thursday evening. Southlake Town Square was jam packed with stalls and activities for the kids to do, all organised and run by the high school students, and most of them free.

Homecoming carnival in Southlake Town Square

The kids had a go at shooting basketball hoops, soccer shootouts and even throwing custard pies in the face of a very sporting high school student. The kids managed to hook up with several of their friends and we lost Alice for an hour going around town with her girlfriends. At 6:30pm crowds lined the streets ready for the parade. Starting out with the police and fire crew, all the high school clubs and groups marched through; the band, sports teams, dance and cheerleading goups and the homecoming king and queen. Lots of them had sweets and freebies which were handed out into the crowd and there was much high-fiving with the football players.

Friday brought the Homecoming Football Game at Dragon Stadium in Southlake, which seats 11,000 people. We went along with our neighbours Victoria and Rich and their two kids Zach & Amelia. There was a fantastic atmosphere. The stadium car park was full of 'tailgaters', which is where people park up in their trucks with food, drink and BBQ's and have a cookout and party in the car park before the game.

Homecoming 2014 at Dragon Stadium

Another Texas tradition in full swing were 'Mums', which are exchanged between 'dates' at the home coming game. Mums are a bit like rosettes but traditionally centered with a chrysanthemum, hence 'Mums', but often also have hearts, teddy bears and lots of ribbons and sparkle, the bigger the better - this is Texas (this link has a picture of some Southlake Mums and a brief history of the tradition http://texashsfootball.com/texas-mums/). The stadium was full, people moving around, chatting to their friends, kids hanging around in groups with their friends, ours included. At half time, awards and honours were given to Southlake homecomers and the Carroll Band, Emerald Belles and cheerleaders provided further entertainment. It was a great game, the final score was 63-28 to the Dragons.

The kids are enjoying the game.

Six Flags Over Texas

Evan on 'Pandemonium'.

Six Flags is a chain of North American theme parks, and there's one in Arlington, between Fort Worth and Dallas, (https://www.sixflags.com/overtexas). Once a year Rob's company hires out the theme park for an evening exclusively for it's employees and their families, plus they give you some 'Daffy Dollars' to spend on food or in the gift shops, and free tickets for another day's entry into the park. The kids have been looking at You Tube videos of the rides for months so they were very excited to be finally going. There are some seriously big roller coasters, so there were quite a few rides they were either to small or too scared to go on, but they still found plenty to do and have set themselves challenges for when we go back again.

Here comes our stuff

Our shipping container and the rental furniture packers were due to arrive today at 10am, so at 8:30am, after dropping the kids at school, the guys from Crown Relocations arrived and started to prepare the house, putting down floor protection and moving our rental furniture out of the way into the garage. Then I get a call from Rockenbaugh, Evan has a temperature, can I go and get him? Perfect. We got home just before the shipping container and rental furniture packers arrived.

Our container turns into Heatherglen Drive.

Captain Calpol oversees the operation.

Breaking the seals.

Right, where do we start?

Evan helps check off the box numbers as they come into the house.

Every room looks like this.

And now the rental furniture van is here too.

My excitement for having our stuff is waning.

It was just as exhausting to do this in reverse. Once all the boxes were in the house, the relocation guys spent most of the day unwrapping and building the furniture, then doing their version of unpacking the boxes, which was to empty them and leave the stuff in a heap or on top of the furniture. The kitchen boxes were a nightmare, each glass and plate wrapped in layer upon layer of paper, I was practically refilling each box with waste paper as I emptied them. There is stuff everywhere but at least we have a huge walk-in loft to just shove things away for now, although I did question whether we really needed it at all as I've only really missed a few things. One more day tomorrow with the unpackers and hopefully it'll start to look a bit more like home. And we have this from our lovely neighbours to keep us going.

,

The neighbours have taken pity on us.

David's first match with the Solar Knights

David is football mad and has been playing in a 'Marshfield Junior and Youth Football Club' team for the last three years. Rob has been investigating the various football, or I should say soccer, options for David here in Texas. After a trial training session David was offered a place in the 'Solar 05 Knights' team with Solar Soccer Academy (http://dallassolar.net/page.php?pgid=2), which are affliated to Chelsea FC. Training (or 'practice' as they call it) and matches are taken very seriously. The coach is full-time, coaching both high school and youth American football and soccer. He has something of a military style, which isn't quite what David is used to, but the players are all around the same standard as David so he fits into the team well.

The first match of the season was at Oak Grove Soccer Complex in Grapevine. The facilities are fantastic; neat, albeit big, pitches with floodlights, small covered stands for spectators, a toilet block and a playground. They play an 11-a-side one-hour match, with a half-time break, adjudicated by a referee and two lines men. David got off to a great start, scoring the first goal and going on to get a hat-trick, the final score was 7-2 to Solar.

All ready to go, even if he is a bit disturbed by the
Chelsea kit.

Evan enjoys the spectators facilities.

He's getting stuck in.

Goal mouth action.

Post match team talk from Coach Cody.

S.T.E.A.M. Family Fun Night at Rockenbaugh

One of this year's big events at the boy's school was the S.T.E.A.M. Family Family Fun Night. Standing for Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts and Math (no 's' on maths, I'm learning to live with it), each facet was represented in different zones of the school with lots of hands-on activities for the kids to do. The science stations were run by the Perot Museum of Nature & Science (http://www.perotmuseum.org, another box to tick on the to-do list). They had rocks and skulls to examine, blew dry ice into bubbles, looked at constellations and measured heart rates. For technology there was a "Bring-you-own-device" interactive quiz. Evan's favourite was the engineering section where he built electrical circuits. There were also maths challenges to complete, and lots of glue and glitter in the art room. We all really enjoyed it, although the icing on the cake for the kids was an ice cream van, sponsored by a local bank, dishing out free ice creams for all!

Investigating their heart rate before and after exercise.

Messing with matter.

Making circuits.

There's possibly an engineer in the family!

Texas Adult Drivers Education Course

The drivers license is the main form of I.D. used here, and they check I.D. a lot; to pay by credit card, buy booze, I was even asked for I.D when I bought a toaster! Plus they have a computer system that registers your driving license and prints you a visitor sticker which is required for entry into the kids schools. Producing a UK driving license or passport for any of these things inevitably causes confusion. It is compulsory to carry your driving license whilst driving, and there's a 90-day grace period for driving with a foreign license, so getting our Texas Drivers License is high up on the to-do list.

In order to get our licenses we have to complete a theory and a practical driving test. For the theory test we signed up for a 6-hour online course. There's no cheating, you have to go through the whole thing, it's timed so that you can't move on to the next page until you have spent what they consider to be long enough on each one, plus they phone you and do a voice recognition exercise every 20 minutes or so. The course is mainly aimed at 16-24 year olds, the most common demographic applying for a drivers license, and it was pretty excruciating. I would say about an hour of it was useful information regarding road rules and signs and the other 5 hours were lectures about speeding, drink driving and general stupidity behind the wheel. It was reminiscent in parts of Harry Enfield's Mr. Cholmondley-Warner: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7UJPjULCa9Q

Know your limits: here's how to top yourself properly?

Suffice to say, I'm now the proud owner of a "Texas Adult Driver Education Certificate". I just need to get myself a Social Security Number so that I can apply to take the practical test, and try to get my head around the irony of driving myself alone to and from the test if I fail it.

Dallas & Denny's

Today was my birthday and it was somewhat different and eclectic compared to the fantastic British themed 40th birthday party I had last year (http://player.vimeo.com/video/102307747).

We decided to have a quick trip into Dallas and our first stop was Pioneer Plaza which has bronze statues of a herd of 49 longhorns and three trail-riders (cowboys) to commemorate the Shawnee Trail cattle drives.

Pioneer Plaza

Next stop was Dealey Plaza, a National Historic Landmark famous for being the spot where JFK was assassinated. Cue morbid fascination with the details of this tragic day from certain members of the family. There is a JKF memorial, a museum and X's on the road to mark the spots of the two shots. As we're standing on the Grassy Knoll a long train loaded with shipping containers, some of which look like ours, passes by on a bridge, and our container docked in Houston five days ago...

X marks the spot, which apparently moved.

"He shot him from up there".

Hanging out on the grassy knoll.

Er, is that our stuff?

We'd managed to work up enough of an appetite for something to eat, so we went to the classic all-American diner, Denny's, and had lunch on the Turners (one of our leaving presents, thanks guys!). Chocolate chip pancakes along with sausages that met David's approval were a big hit. French toast, bacon, maple syrup and a decent cup of tea later, we're ready to roll out, literally!

He actually likes the sausages, faint.

Happy birthday to me,
Having a lovely cup of tea...

Our final destination of the day was Ikea as we need a sofa for the kids playroom - I did say it was an eclectic day! It was just as chaotic as Ikea in Cardiff on a Sunday, and was notable for being the first time I have been shopping in Texas and not parked within the first few spaces outside the shop entrance. A sofa was chosen, but I'll have to go back another day with an empty car to collect it.

Dragons at the AT&T stadium

We've had a brilliant evening. We started off with an invitation to an impromptu street gathering from one of the mums, Erin, I first met at the 'newcomers breakfast' at Rockenbaugh and who has a soccer-mad 4th grade son, Alex, that David has become friends with. They live in a cul-de-sac a couple of streets away from us. A buffet table was set up on their drive with lots of food, tortilla wraps, salsa, fruit, there was a huge drinks cooler full of cans and bottles in ice, and finally a container with wide selection of insect repellents, they have obviously done this before! Erin's husband, Mike, had set up sound system with big speakers on the front garden so we had some top tunes. The kids played football or basketball on the garden or rode scooters and bikes in the street. Our neighbours Victoria and Rich, with Zach (Evan and David's friend) and Amelia were there, along with several other families. Alice palled up with a 6th grade girl from across the street who rides her school bus, so all the kids were happy. It was great to meet everyone, and once again we were sad to leave early just when everyone was getting stuck in, but we had tickets for the game.

Once a season the high school football team, the Carroll Dragons, get to play one of their league games at the AT&T Stadium in Arlington, an impressive 80,000 capacity stadium and the home of the Dallas Cowboys (http://www.stadiumsofprofootball.com/nfc/AT&TStadium.htm). The stadium was enormous and air conditioned, which was great as it was 90 degrees outside. The game had all the pomp you would expect. The players (there are loads of them), the Carroll High School Band, the 'Emerald Belles' dance troop, and cheerleaders were all involved, something in the region of 400 high school kids, a fantastic experience for all of them, and they were good too. I didn't really understand the rules of the game, but it was close, the Dragons stealing a 42-41 victory.

In we go to the AT&T Stadium.

In their 'spirit wear' ready for the game.

Player profiles on the world's 4th largest (2100") HD video board.

David pledges his allegiance to the flag.

The players make a grand entrance.

Half time entertainment by the 'Emerald Belles' accompanied by the
Carroll High School Band.

The band spell out 'Dragons'.